Our Cru staff team returned back to Hattiesburg and began our planning on August 15th after spending our summers all over the world, literally. Andrew, Elizabeth & Wilson led a Cru Summer Project to Jackson Hole, Marshall helped lead a group of students in the Miami Summer Project, Claire helped lead students in the Greek Summit Summer Project (Destin, FL), and Mitch and I helped lead students in the Durban, South Africa Summer Project. Although we all had incredible summers serving the Lord through Summer Projects, we were very excited to get back to Southern Miss and begin the fall semester. This semester, we will be studying the Sermon on the Mount in our large weekly group meeting as well as in several of our community groups (small groups) through out the week. We truly desire for God to use us as salt and light on this campus and we hope that the students will join us in our efforts to establish the gospel's presence on Southern Miss' campus.
Two nights before school began, we hosted a Leadership dinner for 20 students who had voiced their desire to be ambassadors for Christ and leaders within Cru. Andrew casted vision for our desire for everyone student on USM's campus to have heard the gospel and for the campus to be known for their passion for God. In addition, Mitch was able to express the importance of establishing gospel communities (small groups) in each of our lives so as to share the gospel with all person's we are in contact with. It was a great and motivating start to our fall semester!
A few days before school began, we were able to host a Cru table during Southern Miss' Welcome Week. We had the opportunity to meet so many freshmen and give them the opportunity to plug immediately in to our ministry. The first day of school was on August 22nd and we kicked-off the semester by hosting our first weekly meeting that night. And here is where God truly blew our expectations out of the water: We had almost 80 students show up to our first meeting! And what is even more incredible is that those 80 students heard the gospel on their first day of school. God is amazing.
And just to further show how much greater God is than our expectations, we had almost 30 freshmen come out to our Cru Freshmen Cook-Out on Thursday night, August 23rd. We had such a great night of fellowship, meeting new students, cooking-out, and sharing even more opportunities to get involved with in Cru.
God has been doing so many amazing works here at Southern Miss since the beginning of the semester and all these amazing things are only from the first week! I cannot wait to share how He will continue to make Himself known here on this campus in the following weeks! Please continue to pray for our movement, our staff and the students involved, that we will continue to hunger for Christ and desire to live a life worthy of the works that we have been called to!
